Repetition and Checkerboards

 i recently filled three moleskin journals with checkers. 

just the checkerboard pattern. in different colors. sometimes with just black beush pen. 

other checkerboards were made with light blue (almost periwinkle), olive green, true red, and a greenish blue. The greenish blue has minimal green in it, but I note the green because I think that the yellow in the pigment is what accounts for it's brightness. 

I love these flat pages. 

I've been reading a few things at once and they all seem to tie in together nicely. 

It's funny when a flat page takes on a life of its own. 

I wrote something about flatness and beauty for my sister-friend Kyra. 

Byung-Chul Han's Saving Beauty was  my inspiration. 

I don't know why the was is underlined, just ignore it. 

I wrote that some things are stored in flat files of the mind, while other memories are stored in tubes. 

The distinction between beauty and the sublime was my inspiration for this division. 

Let's get an excerpt going. 

Okay here is Chapter 13 Beauty and Reminiscence. 

Faced with a beautiful form, one is reminded of the past. For Plato, the experience of beauty is a repetition of the past, a re-cognition. 

The experience of beauty as a recollection evades consumption, which is dominated by an entirely different kind of temporality. What is consumed is always new, and not the past. Re-cognition would be detrimental to consumption. 

And a little bit later on we get this gem of a thought: 

Consumption lives off splintered time. It destroys duration in the interest of maximization. 

and then the timer on the toaster alerted me to the readiness of my toast. 

i slathered nutella on the two pieces of sourdough. 

anyway, back to maximizing. 

maximizing reminds me of another thing I read. 

Museums are interested in maximizing their viewing body, while also stratifying this audience. They want different zip codes in different galleries all the time. 

How do you quantify the interest in these museum goers? 

You don't you just click them in. 

The data you garner from them is inputed. Flattening. 

("Flatness Rules- Instituent Practices and Institutions of the Common in a Flat World" Gerald Raunig) 

but there's something beautiful about a crowd of people. 

like different chess pieces. 

or rather like a checkerboard. the pattern, not the thing. 

why did i fill three moleskins with the same thing over and over again? 

it felt good to be repetitive. 

it feels nice to flip through flat pages and be greeted with more flatness. 

sometimes i imagine that this experience is akin to working with museum data. 

what to do with all the ticky tacky boxes? 

not much to do, just keep flipping to the next page. 

i think there's beauty in the inundation of sameness. 

maybe because i feel flat during this quarantine, i want to be reminded of the docility of FLAT. the goodness of FLAT. the comfort in being just a number counted rather than an actor in a network, compelled to perform. 

i'm not sure. 

do you have an idea?